The Empire Trilogy (171 page)

Vera was worried about the progress of the war. She had already told Matthew that she had first come to Singapore in order to escape the Japanese in Shanghai. Now, every day, despite what it said in the newspapers, the Japanese seemed to be coming nearer and nearer. Where would she go if they reached Singapore? she asked Matthew, looking innocent and defenceless, but perhaps wondering at the same time whether all the monkey soup he had consumed might not have put him in a protective frame of mind.

‘Oh, don't worry, I'll look after you,' said Matthew protectively, folding her comfortingly in his arms (how light and lithe her body felt against his own!). ‘Besides, I don't think we need to worry about them getting this far.' He nudged his spectacles up on his nose and added more cautiously: ‘At least, I'll do my best. Let's talk about something more cheerful.' Vera agreed, aware that contact with this attractive man had caused her own
yin
essences to begin to flow in spite of her worries. They strolled on. Time passed in a dream. Presently, they found that The Great World was closing: these days, because of the war and the black-out, it was obliged to close early.

They spilled out of the gates in the departing crowd and sauntered through the warm darkness along a street of dilapidated shop-houses. A vast yellow moon was just rising over the tiled rooftops. A man with an ARP armband and a satchel over his shoulder flashed a torch in their faces and muttered something in Cantonese, but he did not try to stop them and they walked on. Matthew wanted her to return to the Mayfair with him but she refused with signs of indignation. She would not go where she was not wanted!

‘But you
are
wanted! What are you talking about?'

‘Mr Blackett and Miss Blackett have told me …'

‘But it's nothing to do with them. The place belongs to me.'

‘It doesn't matter. They behave badly. I am not going to fall over backwards to please them!'

‘Oh, really!'

But Vera had upset herself by remembering this injury done her by the Blacketts. For a few moments she became tearful, even blaming Matthew for having allowed her to be slighted, though she was by no means sure how he could have prevented it. ‘You should tell them to behave properly towards me,' she said sulkily. ‘I am not going to Mayfair again.' As it happened, it would have suited her quite well to go to the Mayfair since she felt too ashamed of her own tenement cubicle to take Matthew back there; having taken up such a strong position, however, she felt she could not now abandon it without loss of face. There was a drinking establishment round the corner: perhaps one of the booths there would be free.

They entered an open doorway where a number of men and women, all Chinese, sat at tables drinking and playing mah-jong, some on the pavement, some inside where there was a little light. They passed between the tables and entered an even dimmer corridor where a strong smell of garlic hung on the stagnant air. The proprietor hurried along beside them, chattering, but Vera paid no attention to him. The corridor was lined with curtained booths and as she went along she opened and closed one curtain after another to look inside; in each of them a man and a woman sat close together, drinking; despite a rich atmosphere of sensuality, however, nothing untoward appeared to be happening. Vera grimaced at Matthew. There were no unoccupied booths and she felt that he could have been a bit more helpful in suggesting somewhere for them to go. But as usual Matthew's mind had wandered from the immediate problem, that of finding a place for them to be alone. His own voice had given him a shock a little earlier when he had heard it saying: ‘The place belongs to me.' For it seemed to him that even this simple sentence cast its own moral shadow. The problem was this: could you own something like the Mayfair and still consider yourself a just man? But before he could properly get to grips with this question he glimpsed something in the last booth, where Vera had without ceremony opened and closed the curtain, which suggested a quite different line of enquiry. For in the last booth there were two startled Chinese men giving each other a rather peculiar handshake. What were they doing? he asked Vera.

‘I don't know,' she shrugged. ‘Perhaps secret society?'

‘D'you think that was the Singapore Grip?'

But Vera shook her head, smiling. She found his question so entertaining that her impatience with Matthew melted away.

All the booths were full. There was nothing for it, therefore, but to take Matthew back to where she lived. They set out once more into the warm darkness of the city and as they went along Vera tried to prepare him for the shock of seeing the tenement where she lived which was not far from the river at New Bridge Road. Presently, they were standing in front of it. She sighed at the smell of drains and the peeling paint and the huddled shapes you had to step over as you climbed the stairs, by no means sure that she had not made a mistake in bringing Matthew here. How sweet-smelling the air of Tanglin was by comparison! Thank heaven that at least she did not have to share her cubicle with several other people like her neighbours!

Still wondering about the Singapore Grip Matthew followed her along what he supposed must be a corridor, but a corridor in which people evidently made their homes; he found himself stepping over an ancient man with a face like a road map, asleep on the stairs over a pipe with a long metal stem. There was no light to speak of, just one naked bulb at the head of the stairs and a slender shaft of moonlight from a window in the distance … but there was enough to see the darker lumps of darkness that lay in neat rows along the walls on each side. He knew instantly, without knowing
how
he knew, which of these bundles were property and which were people. There was a smell in the air, too, besides the smell of drains that Vera was worried about … he recognized it, a vaguely smoky smell, as of smouldering rubbish or rags, the smell of poverty.

These walls on each side, however, proved not to be walls at all, but merely flimsy wooden partitions. Originally this floor had comprised perhaps three or four large rooms, but in order to maximize the rent from it the landlord had subdivided it into a vast number of cubicles not much bigger than cupboards, separated from the corridor by hanging clothes or bead curtains. Matthew peered into some of these dark receptacles as he passed by, but one had to go carefully for fear of treading on the hand or face of an exhausted coolie who had slumped out into your path: in one of them a little old lady with her hair in a bun was on her knees, muttering prayers in front of a scroll of red ideographs with red candles and joss-sticks smouldering beside her; in another a family was grouped around a blue flame eating rice. Someone was coughing wearily nearby, a long, wretched, tubercular cough, the very sound of resignation or despair. So this was what life was like here!

Vera's cubicle, by comparison with the others, was comfortable: it was at the end of the corridor not far from where the only tap dripped into a bucket and it shared half a window with the next cubicle. It was very small (Matthew could have crossed it in one stride) but neat and had a little furniture: the iron bed which for Vera symbolized her Russian ancestry, a table made from the door of a wardrobe resting on a tea-chest, on which, in turn, rested a mirror and a few little bottles of cosmetics. There was an oil-lamp and a Primus stove; biscuit-coloured tatami covered the floor. The clothes passed on to her by Joan hung beside the window (her Chinese clothing had been packed away in mothballs under the bed) with a pair of wooden clogs and a pair of leather shoes neatly arranged beneath them. On the floor by the Primus stove were two bowls and a saucepan; a jam jar contained chopsticks and a porcelain spoon.

While Vera lit the oil-lamp Matthew stood uncertainly beside her with his hands in his pockets, touched by the simplicity of her home. When there was enough light to see each other by they both felt embarrassed. To conceal her shyness Vera began to rummage unnecessarily in her handbag. Matthew gazed at the pictures torn from magazines which were pinned to the partition by the bed: there was a picture of someone whom he supposed must be the last Tsar of Russia, looking very hairy, and another of King George VI and another of Myrna Loy. He sat down on the bed beside which there was a pile of movie magazines and some books. Three or four of the books were in Chinese (among them, though he did not know it, a treatise on sexual techniques, for Vera took such matters seriously); there was a copy of
Self-Help
indented with the stamp of the American Missionary Society, Harbin, and a tattered collection of other books in English, including Waley's
170 Chinese Poems
, once the property of the United Services Club and Percy F. Westerman's
To the Fore with the Tanks
, much scribbled on in red pencil by a child.

Vera sat down on the bed beside him. She no longer experienced the slippery sensation she had felt before and which she usually felt when aroused. Concerned with the impression that her room might be making on her visitor the flow of her
yin
essences had declined to a trickle. She sensed, too, that Matthew's
yang
force had also been diverted into another channel and now lacked the fierce concentration of the unbridled
yang
spirit.

Indeed, Matthew, sitting quietly in this dimly lit cubicle, not much bigger, he supposed, than the closet where a man like Walter Blackett would hang his suits, was again brooding on the question of property and wondering whether it was possible to be wealthy and yet to live a just life. For, in a competitive society, how could you be wealthy in a vacuum? Were you not wealthy
against
other people poorer than you? No matter how justly you tried to behave, and did behave, no matter how honest and charitable and sympathetic to suffering, did not this possession of wealth, which allowed you to go to the opera and drink fine wines now and then, which made your experience of life less harsh in almost every way, cast a subtle blight over all your aspirations? Could someone live justly in Tanglin while at the same time people lived in this wretched tenement riddled with malnutrition and tuberculosis (he could still hear that weary, relentless coughing through the partitions)? This question was quite apart from the fact that the man coughing had been sucked into Malaya by the great implosion of British capital invested in cheap tropical land and labour, for it could certainly be strongly argued that he was a beneficiary rather than the victim of British enterprise, including that of Blackett and Webb among others. He put a comforting arm round Vera's shoulders, thinking that she must not stay here to catch tuberculosis from her neighbours and at the same time wondering how one should behave in order to live justly.

Vera, meanwhile, with Matthew's arm around her had begun to feel slippery again, so that presently, if you had tried to grasp her, she would have sprung out of your fingers like a bar of soap in the bathtub. She wriggled closer and put an arm around his waist. This, in turn, had a certain effect on Matthew for the monkey soup had not ceased to flow richly in his veins. The
yang
spirit, which had been dozing like a tiger in its cave, was abruptly awoken by that lithe yet slippery arm which had encircled his waist: now it came snarling out of its lair, determined to be satiated, come what might.

Without receiving conscious instructions from their owner, Matthew's hands began to wander over Vera's clothes and in due course found some buttons. But the buttons proved to be ornamental and so, after a considerable interval of pulling and tugging which was plainly getting his hands nowhere, Vera decided that they would have to be discreetly helped in the right direction, though this tended to undermine the impression of surprised innocence she had been hoping to convey. Even this did not really improve matters, however, because Matthew's fingers were made clumsy by theoretical instructions which began belatedly to arrive from his brain. Finally, Vera had to become thoroughly practical and take off all her clothes herself: they did not amount to much, anyway, and if crumpled up would easily have fitted into one of Matthew's pockets. Matthew also took the opportunity to remove his own clothes and, as he did so, a dense cloud of white dust rose from his loins and hung glimmering in the lamplight. Vera looked surprised at so much dust, wondering whether his private parts might not be covered in cobwebs too. But Matthew hurriedly explained that it was just talcum from his evening bath. Once this had been settled the twin rivers of
yin
and
yang
which, though flowing in the same direction, one in shadow, the other in sunlight, had been separated by a range of mountains, now begun to turn gently towards each other as the mountains became hills and the hills sloped down to the wide valley.

And yet before the rivers joined, one river flowing into the other, the other flowing into the one, there was still some way to go. Vera, who had carefully educated herself in the arts of love, did not believe that this sacred art, whose purpose was to unite her not only with her lover but with the earth and the firmament, too, should take place in the Western manner which to her resembled nothing so much as a pair of drunken rickshaw coolies colliding briefly at some foggy cross-roads at the dead of night. But in order to do things properly it was clear that she would have to give Matthew a hasty but basic education in what was expected of him. For one thing, a common terminology had to be established; Matthew's grasp of such matters had proved even more elementary than she had feared. Indeed, he seemed thoroughly bewildered as he stood there naked and blinking, for he had taken off his spectacles and put them down on the pile of books by the bed. So Vera set to work giving names to various parts, first pointing them out where applicable on Matthew, then on her own pretty person.

‘This is called “
kuei-tou
” or “
yü-ching
” or, how d'you say, hmm, “jade flower-stem” … or sometimes “
nan-ching
” or even “
yang-feng
”, OK?' But Matthew could only gaze at her in astonishment and she had to repeat what she had said.